Mastering Your Uncertainty Monster

So— How do you experience your own personal uncertainty monster? We all do. It's part of just simply what it's like to have a biological body. Let's understand, your brain hates, loathes uncertainty. What happens is to it, it experiences uncertainty and it's just not uncertainty, it is the fear of death. That arises. And so you can understand why the brain would avoid uncertainty. It would want to control outcome, okay, either by attack or by fear. That's one thing it's going to do when faced with uncertainty. The second thing is it's going to have a whole background, a whole model of being about being able to predict when uncertainty's there and what's going is going to happen. And it has been working on that model of prediction for hundreds of millions of years. So understand, it makes this prediction, and the moment that the prediction doesn't line up with uncertainty, all of a sudden everything goes bonkers. You start experiencing the uncertainty monster. You start experiencing foreboding. You start maybe even experiencing, I've got to get this right now, I'm going to make it happen. Yeah, that kind of stuff. The other thing is that the brain is going to want to win. Now understand, this is weird because it wants to win because by winning it consumes energy and by losing it gives up its energy, its life force to some other entity. That's the way the game works here. Okay. And so you can actually see where, yeah, I understand how the brain is built around uncertainty, and it's going to sit there and it's going to find a way to avoid that. And it is truly going to want to control the outcome. It's going to want to win. It's going to want to predict. It's going to want to avoid the encounter and the consequences of not being able to handle itself in there. So you bring that through evolutionary psychology into the here and now. It's unavoidable. Our species depended on that to become the dominant species and survive the way it did. So the question is, it's not that you have an uncertainty monster, but can you go about changing the way that you as a human being, a highly evolved ape, goes around and actually deals with uncertainty? The answer is yes. For a regular animal, much harder. But for us, we actually have the ability of learning from mistakes. We want to do that instead of having a mindset that says, you know, something on uncertainty, if I don't do everything right, then I'm going to be wrong. And oh God, I don't want to be wrong. I want you to see that as something that you learn. And what I also want you to see is that the only time the brain actually learns okay, it actually learns, is when it experiences failure. Hear that? Suddenly what we're doing is we're saying, wait a minute, no matter how well this uncertainty monster has served me in terms of avoiding death, or perceived death, or getting hurt or something, it's also now limiting me because it wants me to avoid mistakes. Makes mistakes. And the brain does not learn from success. That hardens, that myelinates an habituation. It learns from failure. At the moment of failure, it realizes, oh my God, my predictive value— again, the brain's going to want to predict. It wants a really highly effective model so that it doesn't experience uncertainty. When that prediction fails, there's a moment of learning. And what we want to do is say, well, how would we go about taking that Uncertainty Monster, calming it down, and then reorganizing it so that it's more effective when facing the challenges of uncertainty, the stresses of uncertainty? And friends, believe it or not, the Uncertainty Monster comes out of one experience learning from experience, so it knows that it shouldn't really get around that grizzly bear, or it really shouldn't get around that saber-toothed tiger. So you learn to avoid, you learn to survive. At the same time, in the learning experience, you know, you're going, I'm making an even more predictive way of understanding uncertainty so I avoid it more. But what if you're actually going, you know, it's not a wait. Why is uncertainty all that bad? Well, for biological animals where there's basically an energy exchange passing, you know, it started out with the sun producing chlorophyll, chlorophyll concentrating the energy of the sun, then animals found out that they could eat the plants to be able to concentrate that. And that's the cycle of the energy that you're consuming and passing around. Now, what happens though, if you're saying, "If I want to face uncertainty," what happens is that's where possibility is. That's where the new stuff is. That's where the new self can be. So what are you gonna have to do in order to be able to tame the animal nature of your uncertainty monster? The very first thing is to recognize it's just an adaptation. It's part of your instinctual nature for survival, and it served you well. Honor it. But then what you're saying is, but I know that I need to be able to cool it down because not everything I see now are lions, tigers, and bears that are trying to kill me and eat me and get my energy. No, what happens is a lot of this is just simply our projecting our beliefs about our ability to manage the challenges of living. Onto the world, the screen of the world, and actually beginning to see what happens as beliefs create our future. What we want to do is say, let's change that belief. To do that, understand, a belief is not true. It takes on the power of truth over time and constricts our ability to be in the world. It locks in a particular way that we deal with uncertainty and doesn't let it go until it can learn differently. What happens if we learn differently and say, you know something, if I take that belief and realize that it's really only an assessment and that it doesn't define me as a human being, it's just an assessment of my performances, it's not about me. All of a sudden we're going, okay, wait, then I can take a look at my beliefs really as something that history and experience has created that now are creating my life. Yeah, we create habits to deal with life, and once those habits are successful and they're wired in, they start creating us. That's where the Uncertainty Monster lives. But what if you go, oh, that's only a pattern, that's only a habit, that's only a belief. And how do I get to the belief? The very first thing is you're going to have to calm down the biological emotional response to engaging the stress of uncertainty. Okay? That's done through breathing. That's done through relaxation of the muscles. Because what happens, your breathing, your muscles are part of the emotion. When there is a triggering out there of an emotion, and that's anytime there's a change in status in your environment. Automatically, I have to give a speech, you know, I have to make a presentation, I have to do this, I have to do that. Suddenly the challenge is there. Oh my God, am I going to do it? And the uncertainty monster shows up and casts doubt. Or you overpower it and you say, I'm going to do this. And all of a sudden you realize that's not really a good way either. But calming it down brings it down so that the emotion doesn't crank up high and take over mind and produce, and just produce emotional hijacking. The next thing is you're going to have to learn to produce an observer. And you recognize that all reality is observer-generated. So the first thing you need to do is to step out of thought and stop identifying with thought as who you are, identifying belief as who you are. So you begin to do that and you say, well, what am I? Well, what happened is you've created this entire story. You've created these beliefs that you fell into. They got wired in and they started creating your reality by your experience. Now, what if we were to say, you know something, if as an observer I begin to realize that I and my thoughts, I and my beliefs are not the same. I am not having beliefs. I am not having thoughts. They're having and creating me. That's powerful, and I want you to listen deeply to that. At that particular moment, you can say, well, what is the historical organization of me that keeps building these patterns that I fall into that limit me? That's called the historical organization of the self. And there you're going to find a friend— not really a friend, but a part of the self you're going to have to master. I call it the inner critic. It's the part of you that judges, criticizes, condemns. At the same time, it also tempts. It also says, "Are you sure?" That's self-doubt. Or overconfidence, "Oh, I can do this!" When you recognize that a calm, cool mind would be better, That's the inner critic. You also notice your orphan nature. That's your fear and your aggression about the way you've learned to deal with uncertainty. It was built for short term. Okay, we don't want fear nor anger in our engagement with uncertainty. What we want is a calm, cool, collected mind that is disciplined, that is courageous, that is self-soothing, and has clarity of thinking. That can be built, friends. You can learn how to, when you engage uncertainty and that stress of uncertainty, that uncertainty, uncertainty, that instead of the old historical self that shows up to deal with that, the uncertainty monster, you can pull up a completely different mind. Now we have specialized techniques that we use to get to thoughts, to get to memories, to reorganize those memories into higher functioning. We enrich them so that we can isolate emotional programs, bring them forward at will. That's what we're learning to do is once we learn how to do that, we start pulling them up to be the state of mind that engages that uncertainty, not the old historical one. Friends, this is all teachable. I invite you to look at more videos, go to the website, and start really digging in and start seeing— what you'll find there is you will find a pathway, a process for building step by step by step, a process for change, a process for way you totally change the way you engage the uncertainty. Okay. It's more proactive. It's more centered. It's not through the eyes of fear or aggression. It's through something very new. It's really about, "Oh my God, I as a human being am the creature that can invent beliefs and thoughts that are driving my life as I engage uncertainty." Friends, That's when you become captain of your own destiny. Come and learn, friends. Come and learn. Look at my book. Open your eyes, wake up, and see this is a really interesting situation that we humans find ourselves in. We're the animals that can create the world we're in. We're not just adapting to it. We're creating that world. Come and join us.